Tuesday, December 13, 2011

You Derserve A Break Today

In reading the following from Lawrence Mishell of the Economic Policy Institute the other day, I was reminded of an old MacDonald's commercial which included the tag-line, "change back from a dollar." Unfortunately, the message in Mishell's blog post is that there has been no real change in the unemployment catastrophe, despite misinterpretations of the data by some politicians and clueless news reporters.

And like another of Micky D's ads had it, "You deserve a break today ..." from this needlessly bleak and hopeless situation. But zerObama has given us less change than you could get from a Big Mac and fries out of a greenback. Now, we are watching helplessly as all of Europe runs history backwards, and the best Republicans can do is show us one candidate who is willing to bet 10K that another can't even read.

The Economic Policy Institute Blog

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit Washington D.C. think tank, was created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Learn more »

EPI Research

EPI Resources

Unemployment in November dipped to 8.6 percent, its lowest point since March 2009, down from its 10.1 percent recession high in Oct. 2009. The unemployment rate fell because the share of the population seeking work or working—the labor force participation rate—has fallen considerably. We know this because the share of the population employed last month—58.5 percent—is the same as when the unemployment rate peaked. The lack of change in the share of the population employed—known as the employment-to-population ratio—indicates that the growth in employment has only kept pace with the growth of the working-age population. The figure shows the erosion in the labor force participation rate of people age 25 and older by education level over the last two years.
For the 8 percent of the labor force who have not completed high school, there was no real fall in labor force participation as the small decline from 2009–10 roughly offset the small increase from 2010–11. In contrast, labor force participation of those with a high school degree or some college declined by 1.6 percentage points, with the greatest decline occurring in the last year. There was a somewhat smaller but still sizable 1.3 percentage-point decline in labor force participation of those with a college degree or further education (such as a master’s or professional degree). Thus, this deep recession led to a widespread shrinkage of the labor force that encompasses all but the least-educated workers.